Happy May, everyone! It’s time to put away those April showers, welcome those May flowers, get that Justin Timberlake meme out, and the Los Angeles Times’ LA Food Bowl, which will be putting on fun food events all throughout the month of May. Too cool, right? While there are never a shortage of summer food festivals in LA, this food festival will take place during the entire month with special guests like Mario Batali (Eataly, Babbo), Kevin Bludso (Bludso’s Bar & Que), Massimo Bottura (Osteria Francescana, Food for Soul), Neal Fraser (Redbird),Jessica Koslow(Sqirl), Ludo Lefebvre (Trois Mec), and so many more!

I got the chance to attend the launch party last week at the gorgeous Manuela inside Hauser & Wirth in Downtown Los Angeles. The event was attended by LA Times food critic Jonathan Gold, Chego and Kogi BBQ’s superstar chef Roy Choi, Chef Daniel Patterson, Chef Magnus Neilson, and more. Gold presented Choi with the LA Times Restaurant of the Year Award. So cool! Plus, there were five Food Bowl participating restaurants on hand to give us all a preview of the deliciousness to come throughout May — my favorites were the adorable Panda dumpling from Chengdu Impression and the forbidden rice from Sqirl.

Check out the photos below and the video above for more!

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Photo by Dan Steinberg

Photo by Dan Steinberg

Photo by Dan Steinberg

Los Angeles Times Food Bowl charity partners are No Kid Hungry, Food Forward and PATH (People Assisting the Homeless). For the program schedule, check out lafoodbowl.com!

Food Bowl highlights include:

Chef’s Fable: Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold hosts a pre-Food Bowl conversation with Niki Nakayama, Magnus Nilsson and David Gelb (director of “Chef’s Table” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”) followed by a screening of “Chef” at the Wiltern on April 30

Magnus Nilsson’s “Nordic: A Photographic Essay of Landscapes, Food and People” on exhibition at Union Station May 1-31

Feeding the 5000 presented by Feedback: a communal feast made entirely out of food that would otherwise have been wasted in Pershing Square on May 4

Food for Soul: Cooking Is a Call to Act, a symposium with Massimo Bottura, Mario Batali, Dominque Crenn, Roy Choi and Mary Sue Milliken at the Ace Hotel on May 5

Wolfgang Puck is presented with the Los Angeles Times Gold Award during a retrospective dinner and conversation about four decades of dining in L.A. at Spago on May 8